Leonard McCoy

The Shadow pickups are just trash.

It depends on how define proper. The guitars are set up in the factory in a safe way so that no matter which climate the guitar gets shipped to, it's not a disaster for the new owner. The factory setup of my J-180 Custom Shop was almost perfect in that I only ever so slightly had to straighten the neck by adjusting the truss rod.

Just some marketing jig?

Looks extremely slick. What kind of PUPs are in there? 498?

Through their Made 2 Measure program you could order either one of those in whatever specs configuration you prefer. I myself am not an SG guy, so it's not for me.

That armrest... 😓

The advantage of having the option to plug in outweighs the disadvantage of not having the option to plug in.

Who would have thought: https://gibson-guitar.eu/ No acoustics yet though, but still. Nice.

I find your action at the 12th fret rather high. With 12's on my J-180, I'm having .050 on the treble and .080 on the bass side. The neck is almost perfectly straight. Needless to say, she plays insanely well and easy. With custom 11's you could safely go lower than that.

Yes, there is a Gibson guitar specifically made for that exact purpose and more, and it's this guitar of mine here: Good luck finding a J-180 these days, though. And even though I'm 6′ 2.4″ I still deem Gibson's minijumbo the perfect breed of a guitar for singer/songwriters. Any of the SJs (SJ-200 & Co.) and round-shouldered dreadnoughts (J-45 & Co.) may qualify as well depending on the player's build and vocal prowess and/or recording/performance setup. A Hummingbird I would categorize as the perfect second guitar for the high-register parts, solos, and for rhythm backing or track doubling, less so for the singer/songwriter himself as his accompaniment guitar since it's too overpowering.

It's better if they are a little bit slotted in my opinion for some extreme bending, but the guitars don't have to be. The saddle of your acoustic guitar isn't either, and you can bend just fine without the string slipping on the saddle. There is just a lot of downpressure on the saddle anyway, so it may not even be necessary. If you insist to have it, I'd rather task a luthier with it, since it's irreversible, and you don't want it to be done badly.

With that kind of money and a little bit extra, I'd go buy a nice preowned Les Paul Standard, which in fact I did a few moons back from Reverb myself. Best-playing guitar I have had laid my hands on (asymmetrical neck + plekked frets).

Log-in issues are always severe since they are so impactful to the individual user (they might never come back). For instance, other (long)-term users weren't so fortunate, or rather tech-savvy, to fight through those.

Yes, that same problem had me hosed as well. Fortunately, using the screen name works.

Hard to tell how big the damage is. It's not necessarily a quick fix at all. Need more pictures.

Post a picture. No one can tell from your description what kind of crack it is.

What exactly is the finish issue? It's not self-explanatory from the picture you posted.

Pics?

The guitar needs to be refinished then, which is costly, time-consuming, and not many can do it well.

Hard to tell just from this one photo alone. But since there are plenty of Epiphones out there, better play it safe and pass up on it.

That worked, thanks a lot. It's just annoying to see that the log-in form has your e-mail as a possibility as well. 😕

Every time I try to sign in the site won't accept my (correct) password. And so I have to reset it every time in order to sign into this (old) account and to be able to post here. Tried it with Chrome as well as Edge. Hugely annoying. The issue keeps repeating.

Do a password recovery. It won't accept our old passwords anymore.

I had to do a password recovery in order to log in, which, for some reason, wasn't possible through Google Chrome. Microsoft Edge worked though—strange.